I learned about Tiny Tower through osmosis. Delve into the Twitter hive mind long enough and some phrase ends up sticking to our cluttered minds. Over the course of a week those words turned into a curiosity and that curiosity… Continue Reading →

I learned about Tiny Tower through osmosis. Delve into the Twitter hive mind long enough and some phrase ends up sticking to our cluttered minds. Over the course of a week those words turned into a curiosity and that curiosity ended up as a game on my iPad.

I played it for about five minutes, and immediately knew — Tiny Tower is evil. At its core, the game’s nothing new. Nimblebit lifted the time-management concept from dozens of other Zynga and brought it to iOS devices without the Facebook packaging. It’s similar to what ngmoco is doing with We Rule andGodfinger, but their games haven’t captured gamers’ imagination the way Tiny Tower has.

How did Nimblebit get things right? The developer knows what attracts core gamers and if they can’t grab them with gorgeous graphics, they can lure them in with nostalgia. Nimblebit grabs a handful of our childhood memories and molds it into a deceptively addicting time suck.

First off, check out the visuals — they come straight from the 8-bit NES days. It’s hard not to look at your little renters and not think of all the good times you had playing Donkey Kong or Kung Fu. The second dig at our nostalgia is the basic concept of tower building. It’s something we’ve all done as children either with unifix cubes or Legos, the goal always being to build the tallest structure possible without it collapsing.

In Tiny Tower, players build virtual communities in a building floor by floor. They watch it grow from a simple three-story structure into a soaring skyscraper. There’s also the inhabitants that makes the title more compelling along with the different shops that are generated randomly once player pick one of five categories.

While the nostalgia hooks us in, the micromanagement and more importantly the Bitizens (ie. the little renters and workers crawling throughout the tower) are what keeps players hooked. Tiny Tower provides numerous ways to be involved with the flow and function the building. Stats show how quickly products are selling. Meanwhile, there’s a constant stream of VIPs and customers traveling up and down the elevator that players manage, creating micro sidestories.

But what makes Tiny Tower a step above the average time-management game is that players end up caring about the virtual people living in their building. It’s voyeuristic how players can see into Bitizens’ lives. They can check up on their status in Bitbook (That’s the Tiny Tower’s version of Facebook.) They can check Bitizen stats and see what their dream job is. Nothing is more satisfying than seeing a Bitizen achieve their goals. It makes us secretly want to do that for ourselves.

For the record, I usually don’t stick long with these time-management. I get bored with them. There’s a natural wall there where the games almost force you to pay to keep going, (I’m looking at you Cafe World.) but that doesn’t happen with Tiny Tower. The part that kept me coming back is that I wanted to see new shops and watch the tower expand. At first, it’s easy but the longer you play the more difficult it gets. Adding five floors on the first day is easy but building just one new addition further on takes time. But the game doesn’t force you to pay or invite friends to the game to keep growing. Just a little patience or more dedicated micromanaging can get you to the 30th floor after a week. It’s all right to just solo the experience, and that could be what makes Tiny Tower the best non-Zynga Zynga experience available on the iPhone and iPad.